Planepooling—Commercial Aviation Reinvented
If we could reinvent American commercial aviation from scratch today, regional travel might well resemble Uber's ridesharing models.
In 2021 and 2022, Brent Skorup and I wrote papers and articles on an idea we called “planepooling”—shifting regional air travel from a system of big planes and big airports to one of small planes and small airports. The model we suggested resembled Uber’s ride-sharing products (UberPool and its successor, UberX Share) and were based on years-earlier proposals by aviation pioneers Burt Rutan and Bruce Holmes. Here, I summarize those pieces and, in particular, describe how planepooling could revitalize rural, small-town, and exurban economies—improving and stabilizing those communities’ healthcare along the way.
Our 2021-2022 pieces included:
“Planepooling and Air Taxis for Post-COVID Aviation,” by Brent Skorup and Robert Graboyes, published by Mercatus Center at George Mason University, November 17, 2021 (research summary and full working paper).
“Planepooling: It’s Time to Reinvent Regional Air Travel,” by Robert Graboyes and Brent Skorup, published by Mercatus Center at George Mason University, November 17, 2021.
“Planepooling: Reinventing Regional Air Travel,” by Robert Graboyes and Brent Skorup, published by InsideSources, January 11, 2022.
(NOTE: Some of the text below is recycled from those three pieces.)
THE NASHVILLE-TO-ASHEVILLE PROBLEM
It’s been said that in the Southeastern United States, whether your soul is headed for Heaven or Hell, it will have to change planes in Charlotte or Atlanta. Thus is the notoriety of commercial aviation’s hub-and-spoke system.
In “Planepooling and Air Taxis for Post-COVID Aviation” and “Planepooling: It’s Time to Reinvent Regional Air Travel,” we described what we called the “Nashville-to-Asheville Problem”—the long, multistage odyssey involved in a 200-mile hop from Smyrna, Tennessee to Asheville, North Carolina. We explored planepooling as a way to make the trip faster, less stressful, less arduous, and less susceptible to fingernail-biting worries about missed flights.
[#1] For a present-day air traveler, Smyrna to Asheville involves:
Drive 26 miles from Smyrna to Nashville International Airport—leaving extra time in case of traffic. Worry whether you’ll arrive on time.
Go through security lines, check baggage, find your gate, grind your way though throngs of fellow travelers to board the plane.
Fly to Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson International Airport. Worry about whether you’ll make your connecting flight.
Go through the discomfort of deplaining, traverse long corridors, navigate the airport train system. Worry some more about missing your connection.
Grind your way through the throngs boarding your connecting flight. Fly to Asheville Regional Airport.
Get a ride into Asheville.
By our calculation, this trek takes 6 hours and 20 minutes, with loads of alternating between sitting and standing and pushing and shoving, along with risks of missed flights.
[#2] Alternatively, you can drive yourself to Asheville in 4 hours, 21 minutes—2 hours fewer than flying. Of course, when driving, you can’t nap, read, work, or play games as you can when flying. Thus, the present-day non-hub traveler must ask the counterintuitive question pictured atop this essay:
“Should I drive, or do I have time to fly?”
Faced with an annoying plane trip versus an annoying drive, you might just decide to hang around the house in Smyrna—forgoing whatever business or pleasure or family or friends awaited you in Asheville.
THE PLANEPOOLING SOLUTION
In the late 1990s, aviation pioneers Burt Rutan and Bruce Holmes suggested shifting part of commercial aviation to small airplanes (6-to-10 seaters) flying in and out of the hundreds of underused small airports in America. Rutan and Holmes envisioned a ridesharing technology like Uber or Lyft—though those car services were still many years into the future at that time. Specifically, their vision resembled UberPool and its successor, UberX Share—where the driver picks up and drops off multiple passengers along an AI-designated route. (Lyft has also had Lyft Shared.)
[#3] Here’s how the Smyrna-to-Asheville trip would work with planepooling:
Tap your cellphone app, scheduling a plane to pick you up at the tiny Smyrna Airport—a short ride from your home. If you’re running a few minutes late, call the airport so they can hold the plane for you. (Maybe they’ll charge a late-arrival penalty to discourage procrastinators.)
Drive a few minutes from home to the airport—parking right next to the terminal entrance.
Stroll through the door, where airport personnel inspect your bags as soon as you walk in. You might well be the only passenger checking in at that moment.
Head out the back door and walk a short distance to the plane. The pilot loads your bags into the luggage compartment, and you step right onto the plane and take your seat. One other passenger is already on-board.
The plane flies to the Jasper, TN, airport to drop off your fellow passenger.
The plane flies to the Pigeon Forge, TN, airport to pick up a family of 4 who spent the weekend at Dollywood.
The plane flies you and the family to Asheville Regional Airport—or some smaller field.
You take a cab into town—perhaps prearranged by the air company.
The trip—start-to-finish—takes almost exactly the time it would take to drive. You never have to endure long drives, long check-in procedures, exhausting journeys through gigantic airports, or worries about missed connections. Unlike driving or present-day flying, you can spend almost the whole time napping, reading, watching movies, playing games, sending emails, etc.
[#4] Perhaps you’ll luck out and fly directly from Smyrna to Asheville, with no stops along the way. In that case, the trip will take three hours less than present-day flying, and an hour less than driving.
CHANGING TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETAL TRENDS
The idea of planepooling has been around for almost 30 years, though in its heyday of discussion (c.1997–2004) it was not a practical option. Jet companies and charter plane services have sold empty seats for years, but that market has typically been small, inconvenient, and expensive. Technological advances since 2004 have made planepooling a far more practical idea. Advances on the supply side include:
Ridesharing systems like Uber and Lyft.
Enhanced artificial intelligence for route optimization.
More cost-efficient small planes, including advances toward electrified planes, autonomous vehicles with ground-based pilots, and vertical-takeoff-and-landing air taxis.
Societal trends have also made the idea more appealing from the demand side.
Greater disposable income.
Out-migration from large cities to suburban, exurban, and rural locales.
Increased remote work.
Pandemic-inspired desire to avoid mass disease vector environments, such as large airports.
A loss of patience in an era that favors instant-gratification and loathes waits and delays.
PLANEPOOLING TO TRANSFORM RURAL AMERICA
Planepooling has the capacity to transform Rural America—and rural healthcare in particular. Let me begin with a personal anecdote. Some years ago, I contemplated a move from the Washington, DC suburbs to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Four factors quickly ended this brief fantasy:
Like much of small-town America, healthcare services on the Delaware Seashore are limited. Furthermore, almost all small towns face the threat of diminished medical services in future years. For Rehoboth residents, many critical services require hours of driving.
The nearest significant commercial airports were hours away, with frequent traffic congestion en route an added worry. This would have discouraged me from traveling and would have discouraged others from visiting my home.
Amenities in the Rehoboth vicinity (e.g., museums, restaurants, activities) are limited in number and variety.
Limits on economic growth and local wealth and income present some unpleasant risks regarding future tax rates and provision of public services.
As a health economist, a considerable portion of my work has concerned the question, “How can we bolster rural healthcare in America?” After contemplating life in Rehoboth, I came to realize that the four shortcomings described above were central to the problem—and mutually reinforcing. We cannot shore up rural, exurban, and small-town healthcare without shoring up all of these factors simultaneously. Planepooling is ideally suited for lessening all four problems.
For example, doctors avoid Rural America for the same reasons I avoided moving to the Delaware Shore.
Small towns offer smaller income prospects for medical personnel.
Distance from airports makes business or leisure travel arduous. and medical providers often place high value on travel.
Similarly, medical personnel often favor high concentrations of cultural amenities.
And medical personnel know the pitfalls of living far from top-flight hospitals with comprehensive services.
Planepooling could alter the dynamics on all of these fronts. With air travel available in the vicinity, business and leisure travel would not require long drives to and from large airports. On the margin, this ease of travel could attract more medical personnel and other high-income residents. With more high-income residents, cultural amenities would likely grow—and planepooling would, for instance, put the amenities of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York within quick, easy, and inexpensive reach of Rehoboth residents. Growth in the number of doctors, high-income residents in general, and businesses would expand the market for medical services available in places like Rehoboth Beach—and enhance the long-term financial stability of hospitals and other providers. These changes would also be mutually reinforcing. I’ll note that Delaware Coastal Airport is just 18 miles from Rehoboth Beach, and tinier airstrips lie even closer. Imagine this dynamic playing out across America.
GETTING TO PLANEPOOLING
What, then, is needed to get from here to planepooling? The transition from large-plane/large-airport/hub-and-spoke to planepooling won’t happen easily. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the sheer amount of investment that airlines and governments have put into the current system. Frankly, the likeliest scenario for such a transition is one that includes an existential crisis for the current system. When Brent Skorup and I wrote our original articles in 2021, it seemed that the COVID-19 pandemic might be such an event. (Fortunately, that crisis passed relatively quickly, with airlines still financially viable. But in the early days of COVID, that happy outcome wasn’t obvious or preordained.)
Getting to planepooling will certainly require a favorable public policy environment. Such an environment would likely include include:
Realignment of federal aviation subsidy programs, including enhanced support for small airports.
Strong support from local and state officials.
Prioritizing regional aviation at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Removal of barriers to entry by upstart companies—the equivalent of Apple and Microsoft overtaking IBM and Honeywell in computer markets.
BEST TAKE EVER ON THE MISERIES OF LARGE AIRPORTS
“Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport,” from The Onion. Each time I watch this, it seems more realistic than it did the previous time.
Busses, trains? Maybe a bit slower than driving, but able to read, work, relax.
My thoughts as a private pilot (who recently flew in and out of Smyrna!):
-The regulatory burden is hard to overcome and would probably need to be changed to make upstart companies viable. I’ve considered using my four-seater to charter flights—exactly the kind of Uber-inspired model you’re describing—and the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) sections related to commercial operators is almost impossible to parse.
-Aircraft operating/maintenance costs are high enough that plane sharing would likely only capture customers who have already decided to fly who are willing to pay slightly extra for all the conveniences you mentioned. It would be too expensive for people who might consider the trip at all only because plane sharing existed.
-One driver of operating expenses is the deficit of aircraft mechanics who are certified to do FAA-required inspections.
-I think enough general aviation (GA) airports currently exist to handle demand, but higher demand will drive up usage costs for them as well. (Interestingly, Smyrna is already the most expensive GA airport I’ve flown into, but then I’ve only flown in this region.)
-Then there’s the fact that the GA piloting community is small. If barriers to entry were lowered for commercial operators, you might entice enough people to go through the already laborious and long (and expensive!) process to get the pilots’ license, become instrument rated, accrue enough piloting hours to qualify as a commercial pilot, and become commercial rated. But it would take the promise of relatively high demand for this service, or at least high enough to make it worthwhile.
-To create that demand, you have to also address people’s fears about flying in small planes. GA, as far as I understand it, is no less safe than airline carrier aviation, and yet there’s a cultural suspicion of both the planes and pilots, driven in part by high-profile crashes such as Kobe Bryant and Greg Biffle. For every person I can get to fly with me (just for fun!), there are ten who decline. (To address the other reader’s comment, we could probably quadruple the number of GA planes in the sky without significantly increasing accident rates. There just aren’t that many of us.)
-Plane sharing will always be subject to weather interruptions in a way that ride sharing is not. A GA pilot can’t just say to himself, “I have a few extra hours free tonight, I think I’ll pick up some rides.” It takes significantly more planning, so that bad weather becomes a much bigger issue. I think AI would probably be able to overcome this obstacle.
Frankly, I love the idea and think these obstacles can all be overcome. It will take a lot of creativity and probably regulatory reform, and the FAA’s institutional inertia is roughly the size of a small moon’s.